Nicole Kidman turns up in Tennessee and talks about motherhood at 41

What wind tumbled her to this far-off place, casting a Hollywood star into the quotidian existence of Southern life with its "How y'all doin' today?"s, comfort food, and long, empty stretches of poplar-lined roads? You can lay off the gas; nobody's in a hurry here, unless they've robbed a bank. And if you don't slow down you'll miss Barbara's Home Cookin', an old white house with green columns that turned into a restaurant 12 years ago when Barbara nailed a sign to the door. She's 74 and works back in the kitchen every day, often with her great-granddaughters running around her skirts.

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The waitress has a warm, ruddy face and thick curler-set hair. Hon, you can sit anywhere you like; howabout here by the window—someone left you the newspaper.Would you like some coffee? Some fresh banana breadwhile you're waitin'?...This coffee's caffeinated, is that allright? I forgot to ask. Findin' any news in that paper? A suspect is being sought in a rash of vending machine break-ins; volunteers are needed to transport cancer patients to and from treatment; Elvis' favorite peacock jumpsuit sold at auction for $300,000; and, bowing to pressure, the Wilson County Fair officials will extend this Sunday's "God & Country Day" $2 Christian discount to atheists.

A blue city in a red state, Nashville is the birthplace of country music, cotton candy, the Grand Ole Opry, Hee Haw, and, more recently, Sunday Rose Kidman Urban. Her father is the country music star Keith Urban. Here comes her mother, the actress Nicole Kidman, now. Thin as a whistle 17 days after delivering, she's a vision in white, from her short, silky sundress to the sheer cotton cardigan to skin so pale you can see the blue highway of veins running beneath. Removing a huge straw sun hat, Kidman reveals her milky blond hair pulled back and knotted at the base of her slender neck. "She has this heavenly quality," says Shirley MacLaine, her Bewitched mother. "I find her so otherworldly beautiful, otherworldly intelligent, otherworldly resilient, I call her My Alien. And only an alien could lose all that baby weight in two weeks."

"Nicole, would you like some coffee?" The waitress swings by, pot in hand.

"I'd love decaf if you have some made." Pay no mind to the back-fence gossip. Sunday Rose was not named after the Australian art patron Sunday Reed. "That's a myth," Kidman says, none too pleased it's out there. "We just like the name." There's more to it than that, but Kidman's got no truck with giving out the details. "When it comes to my kids, I'm just like a lioness," she says, growling for emphasis, clawing the air. "I'm like, No one gets near my babies! That's why we chose not to sell the photos of her. We just want to have our little cocoon."

Urban was there through the thick and thin of natural childbirth. "It was the most beautiful thing to go through with him," Kidman says. "I had a great team of women, too. At one point there were nine women in the room and Keith." She smiles. "He's the greatest man besides my dad I've ever met. He's loyal and he's a soul searcher. He'll kill me for.... He's very, very private." She cinches up. "My previous marriage was far more available. This is why I live in Tennessee and live on a farm and I'm very secluded."

But Eva Gabor in Green Acres she's not. "I love it here," Kidman says. "I've got an amazing vegetable garden. I've got a zucchini that's massive—I could enter it into a competition. It's this big," she says, her hands two feet apart. "We didn't pick it, and we were like, how big will it get? We have vine-ripened tomatoes, corn, mmm. I'd always dreamed of it. I tried one in L.A. when I was 25—a little vegetable garden. It was okay. But it wasn't like...this one is huge and overgrown, and people come over and pick from it and take vegetables home, and we eat right out of the garden, it's so good.

"There's something to be said for going back to a simple form of living—nature and family. There's something very...there's safety in that." Which is what her character in this month's romantic epic Australiacomes to realize. Reteaming with her MoulinRouge! director, Baz Luhrmann, Kidman stars as Lady Sarah Ashley, an aristocratic Englishwoman who, on the eve of World War II, inherits an Australian cattle farm—and its hunky drover, played by Hugh Jackman. Comparisons to The African Queen and Gone With the Wind are welcome. "She's so tightly wound and incapable," Kidman says. "And she's never had love. But she learns to believe and trust through the nature of the landscape and the adventure of what's happening to her, and the country wears her down and takes away the facade. And she's finally able to become a living, breathing, fully evolved person. She becomes of the earth."

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Shot over the course of nine months, the film is ultimately a love triangle, though not one we've come to expect. "My character, this woman, becomes absolutely besotted with this little boy," Kidman says. "And it's beautiful, because she can't have children of her own, she can't give birth to a child—which was me until the last two months of the film, when a miracle happened!" A miracle because early in her first marriage, to Tom Cruise, before they'd adopted Bella, now 15, and Connor, 13, Kidman had a miscarriage and says that "I felt maybe that was my lot in life, and I was hurting because of it." Then came Bella and Connor, and "I had them, so I didn't want to be greedy. But I was given Sunday, too—and by surprise!"

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There's a big difference between being a mother at 25 and one who's seen the world. "At 41, it's a more painful love," Kidman says. "I look at that little girl, and I'm, like, Oh, no, what's going to happen? It's almost like my heart is stretching; I'm feeling all these muscles stretch with emotion. It's a beautiful love but there's a lot of fear and pain for her life, and for Bella's and Connor's life." And at the same time, "I like to believe that nothing was stopping Sunday from coming into the world."

Taped to the wall inside Australia's Sydney production office is an excerpt from Christopher Isherwood's 1945 novel Prater Violet: "The film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers.... There is enormous splendor, which is a sham; and also horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery. There are vast schemes, abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisers. There are court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, and tear their hair privately, and weep."

Not 50 feet away, across the Fox Studio lot, it's all playing out on Soundstage 7. There you can step from the daylight through the vast metal door and into one evening in Darwin, Australia, 1939. A children's charity ball is under way in the garden of the governor's mansion. A 12-piece orchestra is playing Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" and dozens of society types in silk bow ties and tails and glittering bugle-beaded bias-cut gowns are dancing on a parquet floor over the lawn. Around the periphery, tables lit by hanging Chinese lanterns are set with china and crystal and bottles of champagne sweating in the warm evening air.

In this scene, Kidman, in a red Asian-inspired fishtail dress, a gardenia in her marcel waves, is scanning the crowd, searching for someone. The secret everybody knows and no one speaks of is obvious. You can tell by the swell that the star is not her usual self. Her stomach, breasts, cheeks, even her lips are overripe for one so willowy. She's pregnant. "Shhhhh!" says the unit publicist, pulling me behind a stack of Kanga Bitter boxes. "Oh god, nobody is supposed to know!" Entering the scene from the back of the mansion is a white-tuxedoed Hugh Jackman looking very leading man. He cleans up good. Kidman catches his eye and they move toward each other, meeting mid-dance floor where—much to the chagrin of the upper-crusties around them—they begin beguining too.

"Cut!" Luhrmann yells. The music stops, the extras stretch, and a guy with a rake perks up the grass. "We're very close to getting this exactly right," Luhrmann says, lifting his newsboy cap, running a hand through his hair. "I want to see the disgust for this cattle driver. Disdain! Loathing!" Luhrmann's wife, Catherine Martin, the Oscar-winning art director and costume designer, walks up. "Stinky set," she says, wrinkling her nose. Indeed. It smells like a swamp. The climax of the charity ball scene, which was shot two days ago, ends in a downpour of rain. The grass has since been mulching, giving off a terrible stench.

Ten years ago this very soundstage was filled with music and dancing and stars falling in love in another rainstorm. I was there—here—on the set of Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! watching Kidman and Ewan McGregor as they twirled up a winding staircase to Elton John's "Your Song" beneath a shower of silver hearts. It was a homecoming of sorts for Kidman, who hadn't made an Australian film since 1989's Dead Calm, the classy thriller set at sea that was her portal to Hollywood. "For starters, she carried that film—and in a bathing suit," says director Joel Schumacher, who cast Kidman in 1995's Batman Forever. "She had to look gorgeous, do the Mother Who Loses Her Child and Goes into Deep Depression thing, and then she had to become this kick-ass heroine."

Schumacher met Kidman on her maiden voyage to Los Angeles when he was looking to cast the female lead in Flatliners. He'd offered the role to Julia Roberts, but she was under contract to do another film. Kidman was set to get the part when Roberts suddenly became available. Here's where fate or destiny or karma or chance or Warren Beatty comes in. Interviewing her for Tess Trueheart in Dick Tracy, Beatty decided she was too young, remembers Kidman. "But he said, `I do have somebody you should meet.' And he picked up the phone and called Robert Towne, who was writing Days of Thunder. So Warren changed my life." Or as Schumacher puts it, "I got Julia, Julia got Flatliners, and Nicole got to be Mrs. Tom Cruise."

On Christmas Eve, in the midst of her next project, Billy Bathgate, the 23-year-old secretly wed the world's biggest movie star. Her costar, Dustin Hoffman, who'd worked with Cruise on RainMan, witnessed the whole thing.

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"I should have never given them the day off," jokes Robert Benton, their director. Kidman laughs at this: "There was no stopping me. When a woman decides to get married, it doesn't matter what anyone says. It's like Isabel Archer in The Portraitof a Lady..." (a role she played in 1996). The legendary agent Mike Ovitz threw the couple's wedding party, held in an airplane hangar. "Everyone in Hollywood was there," Schumacher says. "Everyone. And here she was, basically a girl from Australia, surrounded by every major star. It was overwhelming to her."

"You sign on for the ride," says Kidman, "and that's what I did."

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"She's not a wallflower, but she can be very shy," says her good friend and fellow Australian, Naomi Watts. "By nature she's someone who isn't instantly the most comfortable person in the room, but she fights that." The two met as teens while waiting in a hall after an audition, both hoping they got the part. Neither did, and they shared a taxi home. But it wasn't until Watts moved to Los Angeles in her early twenties that they became close. "Likeminded people gravitate toward one another," Watts says. "You're in this place so driven by the one industry. No one comes with their family—you're driven by work. And you need your family. She was a part of home to me."

With only two Hollywood films to her credit, "Nicole was not really well known yet," says Michael Keaton, her costar in 1993's My Life, "and when she came in to audition, we all went, `Holy moly, this girl is just so good.' But she was kind of living in the shadow of Tom." Of course all that would change in such a way that she would one day be compelled to absent herself from the out-of-control attention. Keaton says, "Alan Arkin once told me that you have to ask yourself if you want a nice career and a big life or an okay life and a big career. But if you can get both, drop to your knees—you're one lucky motherfucker. I hope she's found that. I think she has."

Kidman was brave and ambitious. In 1998 she appeared on Broadway in David Hare's play The Blue Room. All knives were sheathed when the reviews came in. The New York Times, lauding her for a nuanced performance "that never stoops to showing off or grandstanding," couldn't refrain from drooling over her too: "feasting on the vision of the nude Ms. Kidman, she has nothing at all to be ashamed of." Meanwhile, Luhrmann, whose mind-bending original works include Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet, flew to New York to seduce the actress into playing the courtesan and "glittering diamond" Satine in his MoulinRouge!, sending her red roses and a note backstage: "She sings, she dances, she dies!"

Moulin Rouge! wrapped just before Christmas 2000, and shortly after, Kidman and Cruise stopped the presses again when he filed for divorce. Looking back now, did she marry too young? "Um, no," Kidman replies. "Would I want my kids to get married at that age? No!" She laughs. "But that was an extraordinary thing for me. [Tom] taught me an enormous amount—as a girl into a woman. Absolutely, I would do it again."

Untethered, Kidman made a succession of films "running from my life," she admits. "My screen life was far more exciting and beautiful than my real life. I went through this long period of being alone. I was very, very damaged, and I did not want to jump into a relationship, because I would have nothing to give, just shreds of what I was."

She entered a sort of Blue period, painting complex portraits in dark, often small films—The Others, Birthday Girl, The Hours, Dogville, TheHuman Stain, and Birth—while occasionally turning in Etch-a-Sketch work: The StepfordWives, Bewitched, The Invasion. She is at her best playing someone disturbed, or haunted, or, as in Malice, To Die For, and Margot at the Wedding, psychologically askew. "Nicole never lets you see the mannerism, the acting," observes Benton. "She has that ability to be so still and quiet, to use only the tools that are required." Twelve years after Kidman slipped off his set to get married, Benton directed her again in The Human Stain: "She would break for dinner and stand in the middle of this big field in Canada on a cell phone talking to her children. She's an incredibly attentive mother."

When Lauren Bacall met Kidman on the set of Dogville in Sweden, she found her "adorable, professional, but unhappy." Bacall recalls that at the time, "Tom had taken off for Penélope Cruz or some goddamn thing—one of his more ridiculous moves. Tom Cruise is a maniac. I can't understand the way he conducts his life."

The following year, the actresses costarred together again in Birth (2004), and "Nicole kept saying, `I want a baby, I want a baby...' And I said, `Nicole, why don't you stop working for 12 seconds and get pregnant?' I never had that kind of career where they made movies for you. Between Nicole and Cate Blanchett, there's no room for anybody else. They're so beautiful and wonderful and talented—" Bacall laughs. "It's quite nauseating, actually.

"I'm from a different generation. When I started in movies, I never had a publicist. Mr. Bogart never had a publicist! No entourage, nothing! We used to say that's what they do at MGM, not Warner Bros. It's a whole other industry now."

"Lauren's my other mother," Kidman says. "She's the one who always said to me, `Have a baby.' And she was the one that was so wonderful to me when Keith went through a lot of his stuff." The actress is referring to Urban's stay in rehab for alcohol abuse in 2006. "She got on the phone and really helped me through it."

"I love Nicole, but her New York mother has been sadly neglected," Bacall says with great affection. (Note to Nicole: Call home.) "This baby is going to be fantastic for her," Bacall continues, then pauses. "Why did she name the baby Sunday when she was born on a Monday? That's what I want to know."

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Look at her across the soundstage, laughing like a silent movie star at something Luhrmann is whispering in her ear. "Oh, you're bad!" she erupts, laughing loudly now. For all her regal elegance, "she likes naughty-boy humor," says Ben Chaplin, her Birthday Girl costar. "She's very happy with that. I remember the director saying, `If Nicole's flagging, you just need to sauce her up a bit.' "

She refuses to divulge what Luhrmann said that got her giggling. As everyone knows, Kidman can keep a secret. Two years ago she met Urban at a G'Day L.A. event honoring Australians and didn't let on that they were dating until after they were engaged. "I didn't foresee it," Kidman says of committing again, "that you can meet somebody who you have a deep and more profound love with. I don't mean to take away from anything with Tom, but I would hope that he has the same thing—I know he has the same thing with Katie. You move into a stage where you're able to be a fuller person in your relationship.

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"I want to be really careful with that because I don't want to take away from 11 years with that man that were very important. Really, for our kids—they were amidst a lot of love. It wasn't bad. And now they're amidst a more evolved love."

While her first wedding was a Scientology ceremony, Kidman exchanged vows with Urban in a Catholic church. "The most romantic wedding I've ever been to—aside from my own," Jackman says. "Keith got up to sing, and he tapped on the microphone and he said, `I just want to sing a song,' and he's doing the patter. There was barely a dry eye in the house. Keith was looking straight down the room at Nicole and she had tears streaming down her face." Watts says, "Someone said to me, `Go over, maybe she needs a cuddle.' And I said, `No, this is their moment.' "

"I find it fascinating, these two Aussies living in Nashville," MacLaine says. "It's so far removed from everything you'd expect to be part of her life. They've created their own planet."

Kidman's pregnancy occurred while she was in the process of gaining weight to star in Stephen Daldry's adaptation of The Reader. She'd put on nearly 20 pounds when one day she knew: "hideous morning sickness."

"And she'd been such a trouper," says Daldry, who directed Kidman to an Oscar in The Hours. "She said, `Look at me! Look at this butt! Look at these legs!' Nicole was quite proud and, I think, looking all the more the better for it." A chuckle. "I was so happy when she got pregnant, so thrilled for her, I hardly computed the idea that she wasn't going to be able to be in the film anymore." (Enter Kate Winslet.)

Two weeks from now Kidman will be going back to Sydney to do a few scenes for Australia that she'd grown too big to do during production. After that, it's a small role in Nine, a musical inspired by the Broadway show. Rob Marshall (Chicago) is directing the film from a script he cowrote with the late Anthony Minghella, Kidman's Cold Mountain director.

"Anthony passed away and I called Sydney [Pollack]," Kidman says. "We talked for an hour and Sydney wasn't well at this stage." Pollack, who costarred with Kidman and Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut and later directed her in The Interpreter, died last May. "To lose Heath [Ledger], and then Anthony and Sydney—two of the people in my life who looked out for me, molded me, guided me, and were always there—in the one year, I don't even have the words for it right now," Kidman says. "Deep, deep pain. Anthony and Sydney both, when they found out I was pregnant and they knew how much I'd wanted it...I've still got Anthony's e-mail."

"This part—Claudia—was written for her," Marshall says. "Claudia is a muse, a movie goddess, but also a real person, which is her dilemma in the film. And we thought, Well, that's Nicole! And we finished writing literally the night before Anthony went into the hospital. He was going in for surgery and we were hoping he'd be out in a week. We never thought in a million years..."

The other night Kidman had a dream. "And I woke up and thought of Anthony. Because of Nine, he's been swirling around in my psyche—his presence is still so there. To be able to say his words now...his words are like poetry." Without irony, she adds, "I'm the small role—I play the movie star."

"Are you ladies doin' all right?" The waitress wants to know. "Anything I can get you? Your lunch has been taken care of by a gentleman who was eatin' in the back. He said in appreciation for spendin' some time with his young son."

"Really?" Kidman asks. "I'd like to thank him."

"He's gone already. He didn't do it to meet you."

Kidman smiles and says proudly, "Nashville was voted the friendliest city in America." Through the window, a young mother sits in an old iron patio chair, a juicy baby lying faceup on her lap, its chubby hands gripping her index fingers while being rocked back and forth, back and forth. Within the same frame two old ladies wearing matching flowered tops walk arm in arm toward the gravel parking lot, one less steady than the other. "Isn't it beautiful, that companionship?" Kidman asks, not looking away. "That's what we're left with—someone to help us walk to the car. You should move here. You could marry somebody real. There's a lovely guy who sells blackberries down on the corner. I introduced my friend to him, but she wants a musician." Reflected in the glass, her expression is dreamlike. "Keith gave me a life," she says. "He gave me a home. He gave me a home."